THE DISSIDENT MOVEMENT IN U.S.S.R. in the aspirations and activities of the dissident movement, a typical expression of the equivocal situation of the middle layers. By making it impossible for the development of institutions and techniques to follow their immanent logic this antagonism, even though it assures a certain political stability, increasingly prevents any institutional or technical development, and makes the reproduction of the system ever more problematical. At the same time, by ensuring that technical and institutional development and the political behaviour of the ensemble of the social stratum which is supposed to carry it through adapt themselves to the imperatives of the maintenance of the ruling class's monopoly of decision-making, it makes the development of historical alternatives in social and political evolution extremely difficult. In their desire to preserve their more or less privileged social position, the vast majority of the members of the intermediary layers are ready to reconcile themselves to strategies of use and develompent in tune with the ruling class's interests and to sacrifice their own potential strategies so as to obtain an optimal political stability which secures the positions they have acquired. Entrusted as they are with the execution of political decisions and possessed of a certain monopoly of know-how, they alone could put forward and carry out alternative institutional and technical developments different to the ruling class's strategies. But so long as even their most radical proposais envisage no more than their own political emancipation, which remains impracticable, the defence of their particular interests, which is inherent in their aspirations and activities, prevents the convergence of any alternative they might propose with the aspirations and activities of the other social stratum which challenges the ruling class's monopoly of decision-making. Deprived of the social positions and the knowledge necessary to be able to formulate well-articulated programmes and to be capable of undertaking organised political actions, this category, composed of ail those who discharge no directive or responsable fonction in society, can only oppose the often openly coercive methods by which they are adapted to the system' s reproductive imperatives, by passive resistance, by individual insubordination and revoit. Although they do not add up to a coherent programme, these forms of opposition constitute not only a massive phenomenon but also one of the most 41
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